by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 30th, 2005 8:54pm CDT | Comments Off
On those days when discouraged about the course of Memphis events and with questions about the future that seem to have few answers, I always find encouragement in the realization that the real strength of Memphis does not reside in the halls of government or the board rooms of corporate leaders, but in the simple [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 30th, 2005 11:03am CDT | Comments Off
More and more, educational decisions in Memphis and Shelby County are the tail wagging the dog. It’s a strange local phenomenon that it’s not the needs of the nation’s 18th largest school district – Memphis City Schools – that drive the debate on school funding and school site decisions. Instead, it’s the much smaller Shelby [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 29th, 2005 5:31pm CDT | Comments Off
To continue the conversation about what investments Memphis should make, here’s a few guiding principles: 1) Invest in people 2) Build state-of-the-art infrastructure 3) Treat citizens as customers 4) Streamline taxes and regulations 5) Nurture entrepreneurs 6) Create hi-tech magnets 7) Preserve and improve the quality of life
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 29th, 2005 10:33am CDT | Comments Off
Just a few additional thoughts on where to invest then and now… + Clean Up. This is one basic that wasn’t mentioned in the earlier post. Long-time Memphians took special pride in being the “Cleanest City in America” for years. So the continuing and obvious decline in the cleanliness of our streets and neighborhoods has [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 28th, 2005 2:06am CDT | Comments Off
While Mayor Herenton suggests the sale of Memphis parks, Nashville is one of many cities investing in their parkland to make their city more competitive in the knowledge-based economy. Here’s a recent article from the Nashville Tennesseean that updates the efforts of their mayor to improve Nashville parks: Mayor Bill Purcell paid a rare visit [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 23rd, 2005 2:40am CDT | Comments Off
The continuing controversy about tax freezes is about to come to a climax with the release of the long-awaited consultant’s report on Memphis and Shelby County’s economic development strategies and its overreliance on PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) in the recruitment of new business. The report will be released in early December, but already, its rumored conclusions are [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 22nd, 2005 2:23am CDT | Comments Off
Soon, we will enter yet another budget season for local government, and once again, there will be the regular hue and cry about the tax rate, bonded indebtedness, fund balances and the need for public sacrifice. But for the first time, there’s hope that local government will finally talk about fixing what’s really wrong — [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 21st, 2005 2:15am CDT | Comments Off
Just when you think you’ve heard it all when it comes to tax freezes, you find out there’s always one more way to give away county tax money. In that parallel universe where $60 million of tax dollars has entered the black hole of business incentives, nothing is stranger than the ability of the smaller [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 18th, 2005 2:19am CDT | Comments Off
On September 14, we wrote about the “Miracle at Mineola,” spotlighting a Democratic county executive whose brand of direct leadership conquered disastrous budgetary threats and halved the portion of his budget going to pay debt service. At the time, we suggested that Shelby County officials should get a plane ticket and go learn his lessons, [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 17th, 2005 2:29am CDT | Comments Off
Next time we’re recruiting an international corporate headquarters like International Paper to Memphis, maybe we should call the governor. In the case of Nissan North America, state government is giving almost $200 million in incentives over the next 20 years to lure the company to the Nashville area. In case you’re counting, that means that [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 16th, 2005 2:02am CDT | Comments Off
It was the quote that caught our eye. “For every dollar that comes into the city and county coffers, $1.57 will have to be paid in social costs,” argued Bill Wheeler, executive director of Families First, in his opposition to video gambling in West Memphis. Gosh, we thought he was talking about Wal-Mart. * Shep [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 15th, 2005 2:28am CDT | Comments Off
As a followup to yesterday’s blog about the influence of development interests over county school site decisions, this article from the Montgomery (AL) Advertiser indicates that some places are coming to grips with the role that schools should be playing on smart growth issues: Written by Chad Emerson Since March, Jones School of Law and [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 14th, 2005 2:36am CDT | Comments Off
Sadly, the city school board members blinked, never seeming to understand it was because the county school board’s finger was in their eye. Instead of ushering in a badly needed “new day” for school location decisions, in the end, Memphis City Schools Board of Commissioners seemed to go along to get along. While the news [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 11th, 2005 2:52am CDT | Comments Off
In our blog of October 12, we bemoaned Memphis’ tendency to be cautious and ignore trends until they’re commonplace everywhere else, and then rush to copy them here. The subject on that occasion was Wi-Fi, which is being developed by a number of cities which see it as the backbone for their infrastructure of the [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 10th, 2005 2:04am CDT | Comments Off
It’s now been 10 months since the special Shelby Farms Park Advisory Committee agreed on its recommendations for the 4,500 acres of parkland in the heart of our county, but so far, only one of the recommendations has been acted on. In the wake of the resolution of the controversial Kirby-Whitten Highway through Shelby Farms [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 8th, 2005 2:30am CDT | Comments Off
Since Hurricane Katrina, we’ve written about the lack of a cohesive, well-coordinated disaster plan for the Memphis region and about the confusion over the powers of the Emergency Management Agency and the regional Homeland Security Committee. The following article from www.planetizen.com offers some timely reminders about some basic lessons that would make a good beginning [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 7th, 2005 2:58am CDT | Comments Off
For a generation, the proposed highway through Shelby Farms Park has been political quicksand that trapped county mayor after county mayor. Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton – with the considerable help of Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely – not only has escaped the trap, but he can now claim credit for the [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 4th, 2005 2:47am CDT | Comments Off
Every day, the population of Memphis swells by 102,743 people who flood into the city to work. In fact, the percentage of population change that is due to commuting – 15.8 percent – is one of the highest for cities with populations of more than 500,000. These are the first-ever estimates on daytime population changes [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 3rd, 2005 2:11am CDT | Comments Off
Here’s the mantra for Shelby County. Let’s all say it together: Sprawl is bad and density is good. But if you ever wonder why high density has such a bad name in Memphis, it’s because some developers are just dense when it comes to it (see photo on bottom). Prime examples of how prime real [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 2nd, 2005 2:53am CDT | Comments Off
Soon, the Shelby County Election Commission will decide what kind of voting machines it will buy to replace the geriatric Shouptronic machines that have been used here for two decades. The Election Commission needs about 1,500 new machines. The financial cost will be millions of dollars. The cost of the wrong decision is incalculable, resulting [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Uncategorized | November 1st, 2005 2:59am CDT | Comments Off
Let’s be frank: tax freezes are about land development, not economic development. That’s why you may have noticed that the leading defenders of the current Memphis and Shelby County Industrial Development Board’s Payment in Lieu of Tax (PILOT) policies are not leading CEO’s from the business community, but land developers. For 15 years, it’s been [...]
by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons. Cartoons Archive →
Photograph by Amie Vanderford
This ongoing series of photographs is intended to show the daily lives of these single mothers in order to invoke recognition of their similarities to all mothers, along with understanding and empathy from the viewer of the strengths that these single mothers possess within the challenging situations they face. My hope is that newfound empathy with these mothers’ lives will give people some pause before they condemn single mothers when discussing issues such as welfare and other politically charged hot buttons.
